In the final months of my mother’s 91st year of life, she became fascinated watching the clouds in the sky. She called them “European clouds.” When I asked her why, she said they had been described in a book she had read. It was important to my mother to have a name for things she liked. She once said that the reason she learned to identify wild flowers was because she wanted to be able to call her friends by their names.
Mom herself had been named for a flower, Daisy, and perhaps this contributed to her personal relationship with nature. She kept a small collection of field guide identification books in case she should discover some plant or animal that she did not already know. For years, she wrote little journals that had the names of each fern, tree, bird, flower and mushroom that she had encountered that day.
After years of living with Parkinson’s Disease, osteoporosis, she experienced a series of stokes that left her unable to use her identification skills in the last two years of her life. Even then she did not stop cherishing the world she encountered. My mother cherished being alive. In fact, she clung to life tenaciously for almost 92 years and seemed genuinely surprised by the gravity of her final illness. The illusion of living endlessly had become a part of her spirit.
As a child, I repeatedly asked my mother, “What happens when you die?” Her response was always the same, “I don’t know because I haven’t died yet.” She knew enough about nature to know that life and death are necessary to each other. She had experienced grief many times after a loved one died. Yet, she had only experienced living. She only knew one side.
In explaining death to me, she would also say that she had seen enough births to know that newborns appear unwilling to enter the gateway to the living; witnessed by their screaming and crying and struggle to breathe on their own. “We forget that we didn’t want to be born,” she would explain. My mother believed the same was true about dying. As I watched my mother in her final days, it was unmistakable that she too was struggling. She didn’t want to go to the other side.
Life appears so ephemeral at times, like drifting clouds in the sky. On the other hand, like clouds, life seems to be endless. One cloud transforms, moves out on, and another comes into view.
My “to do” list is like a cloud filled sky. Items pop up, get accomplished, and more tasks are added. Sometimes it seems my list tempts me into believing that my life will last until all the things on my “to do” list have been checked off. Like the clouds, however, things are accomplished on my list and disappear from the list, as others come into view and are written down. I know that whether my list is completed or still in progress, I will die.
The clouds drifting across the sky are a visual reminder to me of the passing of time and the illusion of the endless flow of life. For me, it is best to simply observe the clouds, and the changes in the weather that they can signal.
My Turn 